Server ok? Optimization needed?

Hi,

I searched a while in the forums but I would be glad if someone could help me here a bit.

I wouldn't call our forum a bigboard yet...
Some stats:
- about 3000 members (after deleting over 2000 inactives)
- over 450.000 posts
- about 250 logged in users per day (and a lot lot more guests - we have many people reading without writing in the forums)
- about 100-120 new posts a day

When I look at other forums these are very moderate numbers but as I was checking the webstats I saw that we had doubled our visits, hits and traffic over the last two months.

We now have an average of 2.3 gb traffic a day increasing which makes about 240 mb per visitor per month.

As I do not have any comparisons to these numbers I would be happy if someone could tell me if we are still at the low end

The board is now on a dual xeon 2.4ghz machine with 1 gb of ram and unfortunatly only an ordenary ide hdd.

I had to tweak our apache and mysql (caching etc) - I installed plugin accelerator and template compressor - the forums are very fast even when the server load are higher than I wanted them to be (with vB 3.5.x they doubled...)

Some fancy curves can be seen here
http://mrtg.3dchips.net/

Is there anything we _have_ to improve in our setup? Will we get into trouble when the numbers still increase?

[Erwin]

What are the loads?

[Alex_]

You can see them on my mrtg page - it's the 'Load Averages'
The unit is load * 100 (the script seems not to be able to handle floats)

[MrLister]

You're fine. You max load is 1? You have nothing to worry about for a LONG time

[TopKing]

hello sir
what abut me

i have load average: 10.20 up to 70.10 some times and the server stop

i have
Threads: 55,905, Posts: 903,526, Members: 24,633

Currently Active Users: 1011
up to 2000 up to 2500 so its so mush

i hear abut huck who can help me
any good help pls ?

[MrLister]

TopKing: you're defiently going ot have to do something about that. Did you ever config your httpd.conf or my.cnf?

[Alex_]

Originally Posted by MrLister

You're fine. You max load is 1? You have nothing to worry about for a LONG time

It was 4
But ok I know that's not much...

The cpu load (not avg load) has more than doubled with the update to 3.5 and the forum lagged quite a lot... with plugin accelerator (and some sql tweaks) it's fast as before but the cpu load is still 25-50% while it was 0-10% before.

I never thought that our system could be fully streched with only our not-so-big forum but with 3.5 I think a dual xeon is minimum

[MrLister]

Do you have any sort of PHP cache installed such as mmcache or apc? Also my.cnf? MySQL cache enabled?

[Alex_]

mysql is optimized using a collection of tipps from several vB forums (com org etc ) - the standard setup without caching did a good job before 3.5 so I was simply too lazy to do this earlier...

We do not have any acceleration addons yet however I want to take a look at the template cache plugin when it's ready to store them in the memory and not on the hdd.

Perhaps I should also take a loop at php caching or precompiled php...

Since we have only one gig of ram and the mrtg shows that it's always full while the system is swapping things out - should we first upgrade ram?

[MrLister]

Defiently upgrade the ram. Swap will crash your server and cause higher server loads fasters then anything else. (1GB should do it but it's using 100% of your swap meaning you don't really know how much you need. you can type in "free -m" and see how much memory is in cache because what's swapped could easily just be the stuff that's not used that's waiting to expire)

Also install http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=165367 . The memory would probably run you a extra $25 / month, APC above will cost you nothing except 3 minutes of your time and the difference should be day and night.

Originally Posted by Alex_

mysql is optimized using a collection of tipps from several vB forums (com org etc ) - the standard setup without caching did a good job before 3.5 so I was simply too lazy to do this earlier...

We do not have any acceleration addons yet however I want to take a look at the template cache plugin when it's ready to store them in the memory and not on the hdd.

Perhaps I should also take a loop at php caching or precompiled php...

Since we have only one gig of ram and the mrtg shows that it's always full while the system is swapping things out - should we first upgrade ram?